Jim Arnison

For 26 years from 1964, Jim Arnison, who has died aged 82, was northern correspondent for the Daily Worker (after 1966, the Morning Star). He was never happier than when covering the industrial battles of the era.

One of the longest and most dramatic was the Roberts-Arundel strike in Stockport, Greater Manchester, which erupted into violence in February 1967 after the American owner sacked 145 employees and advertised for non-union labour. For 18 months, Jim became a fixture on the picket line and at the local engineering union office. His book, The Million Pound Strike (1970), gave a blow-by-blow account of the dispute.

Similarly, his book, The Shrewsbury Three: Strikes, Pickets and "Conspiracy" (1974), documented the injustice of a case the previous year in which 24 building workers were tried for "conspiracy to intimidate and unlawful assembly" and three of them, Des Warren (obituary, May 1 2004), Ricky Tomlinson and John McKinsie Jones, were sent to prison. During the miners' strikes of 1974 and 1984-85, Jim was working from dawn to dusk.

Born in Salford, Greater Manchester, Jim topped the class in English and French at his secondary school. He recalled how at home he would listen to his trade unionist father passionately arguing politics and union issues. Like other local youngsters, he suffered the illnesses of poverty; rickets meant he wore leg splints for several years.

In 1939, aged 14, he went into the building industry - completing his education in Salford's excellent public library. His later support for the Working Class Movement Library was fired by that experience. From 1943 he served as a radar operator on the light cruiser HMS Argonaut in the Atlantic, Greece and, in 1945, Japan, where he visited Hiroshima. "It was like walking through a gigantic cemetery," he wrote in his autobiography, Decades (1991).

After the war he joined Ex-Service-men for Peace and later CND. Back in the building trade, a member of the Communist party and working as a plumber, he became a shop steward, and later president, of his local union branch. In the late 1950s and early 60s, he was active in the north-west's opposition to the resurgence of Sir Oswald Mosley's neo-fascist movement.

Honest, forthright, generous and humorous, Jim was universally respected. I first met him in the 1970s while working in television documentaries. He was unstinting in his help and advice on industrial and trade union affairs, despite me being a "softie southerner".

Jim died shortly before his wife Millie, who was already ill with cancer. He is survived by three daughters, 10 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.